Freestyle SVG Exporter

This add-on can export your Freestyle Renders into an SVG file. It can fill contours with their material color and can also export SVG animations.

../../_images/addons_render_render-freestyle-svg_suzanne.svg

An example of an SVG result produced by the Freestyle SVG Exporter.

Activation

This add-on can be enabled via Preferences ‣ Add-ons ‣ Render ‣ Freestyle SVG Exporter. The interface for the exporter should now be visible as a new panel in the Render tab.

Reference

Category:

Render

Panel:

Properties ‣ Render ‣ Freestyle SVG Export

Usage

Activate Freestyle rendering and then render your scene with Render Image. Your render will be displayed, and the SVG version will be saved to the default output path Properties ‣ Output ‣ Output.

Options

../../_images/addons_render_render-freestyle-svg_panel.png

Freestyle SVG Export panel.

Mode

Option between Frame and Animation. Frame will render a single frame, Animation will bundle all rendered frames into a single .svg file.

Split at Invisible

By default the exporter will not take invisible vertices into account and export them like they are visible. Some stroke modifiers, like Blueprint, mark vertices as invisible to achieve a certain effect. Enabling this option will make the paths split when encountering an invisible vertex, which leads to a better result.

Fill Contours

The contour of objects is filled with their material color.

Note

This feature is somewhat unstable – especially with animations.

Stroke Cap Style

Defines the style the stroke caps will have in the SVG output.

Miter

Corners with sharp edges.

Round

Corners are smoothed.

Bevel

Corners are beveled.

Exportable Properties

Reference

Panel:

Properties ‣ View Layers ‣ Freestyle Line Style SVG Export

Because the representation of Freestyle strokes and SVG path objects is fundamentally different, a one-on-one translation between Freestyle and SVG is not possible. The main shortcoming of SVG compared to Freestyle is that Freestyle defines style per-point, where SVG defines it per-path. This means that Freestyle can produce much more complex results that are impossible to achieve in SVG.

There are extended options for the exporter, located at the specific panels of the Freestyle renderer at the View Layers tab of the Properties. Those options are located at the Freestyle Line Style SVG Export panel, at the bottom of the tab.

The properties (no modifiers applied) that can be exported are:

  • Base color

  • Base alpha

  • Base thickness

  • Dashes

Animations

The exporter supports the creation of SVG animations. When the Mode is set to Animation, all frames from a render – one when rendering a frame (F12) or all when rendering an animation (Shift-F12) – are saved into a single file. Most modern browsers support the rendering of SVG animations.

../../_images/addons_render_render-freestyle-svg_cube.svg

An SVG animation rendered with the exporter.

Exporting Fills

Fills are colored areas extracted from a Freestyle render result. Specifically, they are defined by a combination of the Contour and External Contour edge type, combined with some predicates. The fill result can be unexpected, when the SVG renderer cannot correctly render the path that the exporter has generated. This problem is extra apparent in animations.

../../_images/addons_render_render-freestyle-svg_pallet.svg

An example of an SVG result produced by the Freestyle SVG Exporter. Model by Julien Deswaef.

Fills support holes and layering. When using layers, the exporter tries to render objects with the same material as the patch. The exporting of fills and especially the order in which they are layered is by no means perfect. In most cases, these problems can be easily solved in Inkscape or a text editor.